I have been dedicated to making art my entire life. Growing up in rural Vermont, there was nothing else to do. As I got to college I was challenged by the fact that all my friends were in degrees that would get them a job while I was spending hours making an object that would guarantee me no monetary gain or “real world” skills. I went into a depression within my art practice, the action I had always felt was my sole purpose seemed like a meaningless childhood fantasy.

After a year what I realize now is the importance of art. Art is my contribution to culture. It is my method of communicating and interpreting the systems and landscapes around me. What I love about art is that it can’t be claimed by an institution, cooperation, or system. It functions independently and as a product of the human experience.

My work is a reflection of the rural corridors where I grew up. I was raised in a home built by my parents on an abandoned junkyard, I have spent my entire life observing dead materials and discovering new objects beneath the dirt. When you leave on the dirt road from my childhood home in the woods you end up in a post-industrial town that was once a thriving mill operation. Today, many infrastructures are left crumbling and there are several abandoned factories. These abandoned areas have become a playground for youth to skate and paint. Local houses’ current methods of showing off wealth are based on how much-broken machinery and random trinkets fill the yard outside your home. To me, these contrarian displays of wealth represent the failing capitalism in our country that continues to exploit the people, damage the environment, and push materialism. My artwork is a method of recycling and reimaging these spaces that make up the category of rural America.

I make large-scale metal sculptures using old machinery and automobiles archived from scrap yards. The process of collecting these parts and excavating these wasteland sites is a huge part of the pieces themselves. My work utilizes industrial welding techniques that are contorted into an art form. I take function-based practices to build aesthetic-based forms. My work is a meditation on the idea that when all societal systems fail such as capitalism, consumerism, or when infrastructures crumble: who occupies these spaces and how are they taken back? As a youth, the single most important thing we can do is utilize our contemporary eye to question and provoke old and current ideas. My art practice is my method for doing so.

Photo by Ruby Brown